Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey?
by William Oncken, Jr., and Donald L. Wass
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November–December 1974 issue of HBR and has been one of the publication’s best-selling reprints. For its reissue, Harvard Business Review asked Stephen R. Covey to provide a commentary.
WHY IS IT THAT MANAGERS are typically running out of time while their subordinates are typically running out of work? Here we shall explore the meaning of management time as it relates to the interaction between managers and their bosses, their peers, and their subordinates.
Specifically, we shall deal with three kinds of management time:
Boss-imposed time—used to accomplish those activities that the boss requires and that ...
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